Part of it is because modern day computers seems so... uninspired. And time after time we also see the mainstream reinvent what the Amiga had 25 years ago. Yet there are still missing bits for us in modern computing. And because the community has diversified. Some just loves the classic systems. Some care about the elegance of the hardware. Some loves the OS and user experience, and want to reproduce it on newer systems (e.g. AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4)
I'm currently trying to "reintroduce" AmigaOS into my life via AROS (AROS is an open source AmigaOS re-implementation). There are challenges - while there are lots of features in it I miss dearly, there are also so many things I have come to expect from Linux that is not there. So I'm taking the approach of running AROS in a docker container, let it mount my home directory, and bring it up on its own work space, so I can work on filling gaps in AROS to let me spend more and more time in it. I don't necessarily see myself using it 100% of the time, but thankfully a combination of a decent window manager, workspaces and docker makes it trivial to get an environment where I can mix and match AROS with Linux.
The full-circle feeling is hitting me hard whenever someone makes a simple JS program that shows a rotating cube in the browser and everybody falls off their chairs that this is possible.
The only thing that has really changed is how we consume media (movies, music, news, books and so on) and how software is delivered. For all the rest of it we could be back in 1987 dialing into some video text service but with better graphics. 1200/75 Looks so much faster than 180/20 anyway.
The real net revolution is still waiting somewhere in the wings, when it hits we'll be remembering the days before it on the web as the pre-history and some kind of distraction from making real progress for more than two decades.
Roads have interesting properties, they enable all kinds of activities that were previously impossible because each and every idea started with 'first we have to build these roads'. Pretty soon we'll have multiple megabits upstream from just about every locality for a relatively low cost.
IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will (hopefully) get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).
>IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will (hopefully) get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).
We can hope. But I'm not optimistic. Legacy kludges like NAT have a habit of sticking around for a long, long time. And ISP have come to rely on NAT basically -- like you say -- as a firewall for their less technically-inclined customers.
It's too bad, IPv6 could have opened up a world of p2p apps.
I'm currently trying to "reintroduce" AmigaOS into my life via AROS (AROS is an open source AmigaOS re-implementation). There are challenges - while there are lots of features in it I miss dearly, there are also so many things I have come to expect from Linux that is not there. So I'm taking the approach of running AROS in a docker container, let it mount my home directory, and bring it up on its own work space, so I can work on filling gaps in AROS to let me spend more and more time in it. I don't necessarily see myself using it 100% of the time, but thankfully a combination of a decent window manager, workspaces and docker makes it trivial to get an environment where I can mix and match AROS with Linux.